Polymorphic Systems were one of the
early S-100 companies. The competed with Altair, IMSAI and the Sol. They were
located on Ward Drive in Santa Barbara CA. The came out initially
with the Poly-88 or the "orange toaster" (nicknamed because the boards generated
a lot of heat inside the small orange chassis box with no fan). This box
could only hold five S-100 boards and no disk drives. It was a cassette
based data storage system.

Later (1977), PolyMorphic came out with
their System 8813. This had 1,2 or 3 5" floppy disk drives housed in
a "NorthStar like" metal and wood cabinet along with a BASIC language
interpreter. It should be noted that they had their own BASIC that was
said to be better than MS BASIC in several ways at the time. Soon
respectable business applications started to appear. Over time programmers
could choose from BASIC, FORTRAN, Forth, or assembly language for the system.
The system was only a 2 MHz 8080 CPU, (actually it ran at 1.8432 MHz so that it
could be easily divided to produce standard baud rate clocks). This combined with its 5 "
single-sided single-density floppy drives (90K /disk) could not stand up to the
on slot from the IBM PC.

Sirhous Parsei was the controller of Polymorphics when it
folded. He lbecame the owner of the company and managed support for users.
Mark MacLin was the principal design and support engineer. Mark now
(2114), works for Microsoft